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A word from the wise…….

The Anna Raccoon Archives

by Anna Raccoon on September 3, 2009

I have blogged a lot recently HERE and HERE and HERE about the manner in which Nu-Labour have been redistributing tax payers money into areas that are ultimately either vote winners for them or feathering the nests of their support bases. This morning I came upon a blog post that is so raw and honest, and obviously well informed on the subject of the vast ‘housing benefit’ industry that I have asked permission to reproduce it in full. Read it and weep. The language may be stronger than you are used to on this site, but this girl deserves to be listened to.

Even the recipients of ‘benefits’ can see the insanity of what has been going on.

Yes we all know that Gordon Brown is a total cunt but on this one subject he is bang to rights. He is not going to take cash from the poorest families, he is simply not going to give it to them in the first place. And please remember that this money he is ‘taking off/not giving to the poor’ is not theirs, it’s not his, it belongs to the tax payer.

Here is the deal, 18 months ago my rent was paid direct to my landlord. He was happy, I was happy. Then my rent went up but my local council wouldn’t meet the difference.

Why not says me?.

Because that’s old rules, says them.

? says me.

To have your housing benefit increased you need to cancel your claim and then resubmit it, says them.

Why, says me?

Cos then we can put you onto new rules, says them.

OK, do it, says me.

Tis done, now one of the things with new rules is that we will no longer pay your landlord direct. We will give you the money and you must pass it on to him, says them.

Why, says me?.

Cos that’s the new rules, says them.

But the old rules worked just fine, says me.

Ah but with the new rules we can start handing responsibility for rental payments back to the tenant, it’s all about encouraging them to be responsible for themselves, says them.

Are you having a fucking laugh, says me?.

No, says them.

So you honestly expect the local druggy to hand £700 you have just dumped in his bank account over to his landlord and not shift his arse straight down to his dealer and pump the whole lot into his veins, says me?.

Yes, says them.

What the fucking fuckity fuck are you thinking of here, says me?.

It’s all about handing back responsibility, says them?.

To drug addicts, are you mad, how the hell will anybody on benefits be able to rent privately after all the drug addicts have ripped the landlords off left right and centre, says me?.

But they won’t, says them.

How the hell do you know that, says me?.

Cos Nu-Labour say they won’t, says them.

pop, fizzle, splat, goes my head.

As an added bonus to these new rules, it was decided (by some retarded monkey in a box somewhere) that not only were they going to hand millions of tax payers pounds to the local drug dealer they would also hand over more than was actually required. What they did was decide the acceptable rental fee for a property and that’s what you got. Even if your rent was actually lower than that amount. You could keep up to £15 a week of the excess payment.

Now Gordon (and the bean counters) have just realised that this was a totally cuntingly stupid idea that has cost them millions/billions. And trust me on this, it’s not the over payments that have cost the money, it’s the fact that most of the the money paid out in housing benefit under ‘new rules’ went into heroin, crack etc instead of to the Landlord.

So I think Labour should scrap this scheme now, not wait until April.

Here are a couple of humerous quotes from the article.

Crisis, the housing charity, said that it could mean that people on £65-a-week jobseeker’s allowance losing 20 per cent of their income.

Karen Buck, a Labour MP who campaigns on housing, said: “We should not under any circumstances be taking money from the poorest and making them choose between reasonable housing bills and meeting day-to-day expenses. I don’t know how many that applies to. Either way, either the savings aren’t there or poor people will suffer.”

Income, fucking income, it’s not fucking income, they didn’t get this money by working, they got it given to them by the State.Not only that, but they got given more than they needed. It would appear it is okay to reduce the income of those that fucking work by taxing the shit out of them but you can’t not hand it over to the chav’s, scavs druggies and the simply bone idle cos that is just wrong.

And now for the best one.

The reform was introduced to give tenants greater control over their housing arrangements by paying the rent themselves, and the option to trade quality for extra cash.

If you read this statement carefully, what it actually says is that if you want to keep a larger chunk of your housing benefit we can move you into a property that requires less rent/is not actually fit for habitation and you can’t sue us for that. This was a scam bought into to tempt people to accept sub-standard accommodation with no complaints for a bit of cash. And it has backfired. Big Time.

It backfired because, as usual Gordon thought he was being real clever. He thought that the thickies would be happy to pay rent for shit accomodation in return for an extra couple of quid. He didn’t figure that druggies would live in a cesspit if you paid them. He also didn’t figure that they would keep all the money and happily get evicted time and again. They are happy to do this because they know when they become homeless the local council is honour bound to put them at the top of the re-housing list.

Utter, utter cuntbaskets one and all. Scrap this system. Now. It was a fuck up waiting to happen, and you can bet your hairy arse that the real reason they want to scrap it is not because of the over payments, it is because by allowing druggies to keep the money and fuck the private landlords off local councils are now facing a social housing shortage like never before, add to that, people losing their jobs and their homesand you have quite a problem on your hands.

Yes, I do receive full housing benefit and full council tax benefit. Yes the rent goes into my bank. Never once, in 18 months have I spent the money. Never once has my rent been late. However, I still hate the idea of that money going into my bank account, I live in fear that I will be a victim of fraud and that money will be stolen. It is not mine, it is my Landlords and should go direct to him. In 18 months he has had to take to court and evict 12 tenants for non payment of rent. All of them were on benefits, all of them were on ‘new rules’. It has very nearly cost him his business and very nearly cost me my house. I am now the only benefit case on his list. And I had to beg him not to evict me.

This system is wrong on so many levels it is unreal. It must be scrapped, and now.

Spot on. I remember having to deal with this farcical system myself. Each an every question I had was answered with a sodding form and “Fill that one in” or a “Its the rules” type statement from the form processing monkeys behind the safety glass.

No wonder they have to install safety glass an CCTV to keep them safe.

I signed on for the first time 8 weeks ago. My case still hasn’t been reviewed by the DWP because of the current backlog. No money at all from the state. Thankfully we still have some cash left from my redundancy pay, but this will run out next month. My wife has just got a part time job at a supermarket, 12 hours a week. However, this week she is doing induction/training as well, and so her hours will be over 24. Your partner, in a couple claim where there are dependents, cannot work over 24 hours a week. She has had to sign off for this week only. Oh, and anything either of us earn (I leaflet for a lo-cost supermarket and referee, my wife now works at a supermarket and housekeeps for a local vicar-just to show we are trying not to sponge too much) is taken of the jobseekers allowance that we have not yet received. You can see why people refuse part-time work when on JSA.

The whole system is a mess when you are penalised more for trying to help yourself than not.

In many ways I’m in favour of people being made to look after the money themselves but only if when it’s gone there is no more until next month no matter how much they howl. It does teach responsibility.

I know I must sound like a broken record harping on about Negative Income Tax but it is something that would cut out all the varied benefits and hoops people have to go through when they are made redundant. There was a very good summary of it in n editorial in Analog a good number of years ago mentioning several trials that were carried out in the US. The only drawback with it is that it would make a lot of staff at jobcenters and so called ‘training’ organisations, but isn’t a bad thing is it?